A year in which the street oaks, stressed,
Cast pollen with abandon and
By fall have walkers
Running from the
Acorn deluge
Leads one moist nut
Come early Spring --
And hail the cycling of El Nino! --
To swell and
Finger down a root
Into
The hostile city muck.
Rubble, pipe, dry traps of builders' sand,
Irrigation boxes, concrete forms for
Path and pavement
But still some old
Adobe clay,
Enough;
A sapling, primed to reach
Fast for light,
Not branch in joggers'
Eyes
Or drivers' glass,
Stretches
From its median home
Until it is
The tree it is.
At ten feet
It forms a canopy,
Is marked, now, by the
Tree folk of the town,
A well-positioned California freebie --
Sure, no first-choice arbor
(Acorns, caterpillars, the endless
Drop and leaves that
Spike)
But native all the same.
Another El Nino, then.
The plant drinks deep --
Divides its cells, splits skin
Once more,
Grows three feet in a year
And out as much,
Powers through another spring,
Another and another
And now, expansive in its
Might, the tree seeks out new land
Under sidewalk,
Sewer lateral, the road,
The deep-set rebarred
Stone and –
Where required –
It simply pushes them aside.
A dry year next.
The street oak cleaves
(Not just its broad circumference)
Again --
The blacktop too is fissured now,
Echo to blind, thirst-gripped
Encinal rooting.
And into that asphalt
Breech
Come Spring
Fresh pollen washes,
Joins brake dust,
Leaf bones, fragment
Feathers,
Grit blown in from desert China,
Splinters of the neighbor's
Redwood mulch,
Her toddler's rice cake crumbs,
Fine sump oil slick,
Thick cyclist’s hawk and
Seeds.
Crabgrass, knotweed, poppy, moss,
Dandelion, buckwheat, bindweed, dock,
Mallow, cedar, acacia, oak.
I stand outside my house and
Calculate.
A year, or maybe three, of
Civic atrophy -- Hold the Roundup!
Garage the sweepers! City,
Spare your protected roots! –
And this street would
Be broken,
Buried,
Quietly, inexorably
Rendered
And then re-shaped
Endlessly after
By Nature's legion
Volunteers.